Recently, Research Group Led by Prof. You Bo and Prof. Xia Baoyu published their research work entitled "Simultaneous Generation of H₂O₂ and Formate by Co-Electrolysis of Water and CO₂ over Bifunctional Zn/SnO₂ Nanodots" on Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and formate are important chemicals used in various chemical manufacturing industries. One promising approach for the simultaneous production of these chemicals is coupling anodic two-electron water oxidation with cathodic CO₂ reduction in an electrolyzer using nonprecious bifunctional electrocatalysts. Herein, we report an innovative hybrid electrosynthesis strategy using Zn-doped SnO2 (Zn/SnO2) nanodots as bifunctional redox electrocatalysts to achieve Faradaic efficiencies of 80.6% and 92.2% for H₂O₂ and formate coproduction, respectively, along with excellent stability for at least 60 h at a current density of ~ 150 mA cm-2. Through a combination of physicochemical characterizations, including operando attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), isotope labeling mass spectrometry (MS)/1H NMR and quasi-in-situ electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), with density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we discovered that the Zn dopant facilitates the coupling of *OH intermediates to promote H₂O₂ production and optimizes the adsorption of *OCHO intermediates to accelerate formate formation. Our findings offer new insights into designing more efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst-based pair-electrosynthesis system for the coproduction of H₂O₂ and formate feedstocks.

Link to this paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/anie.202304050